On The Avenue

When a large steel bucket fell from the roof of a fifty-four-story construction site in midtown the other day, a news account described the offending building’s location as “1 Bryant Park”—a stately address, to be sure, but not a real one. “Bryant Park is a park, named Bryant,” Anthony Borelli, the director of land use, planning, and development at the Manhattan Borough President’s office, said recently. “That building is kitty-corner to Bryant Park.” In other words, the building, also known as the Bank of America Tower, is on Sixth Avenue at Forty-second Street. It costs fifty-five hundred dollars to apply for a dispensation from the ordinary grid system, known officially as a “vanity address,” from the Topographical Bureau, which Borelli oversees. “They have officially requested it, and we’ll consider it,” he said of the developers of the would-be 1 Bryant Park.

Borelli is a somewhat reluctant steward of the vanity-address program, which dates back several decades and can be blamed for, among other things, the proliferation of the word “plaza” and the disproportionate number of businesses and homeowners with Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue letterheads. (“Pulling an avenue address over” is the topographical parlance for denying that your building’s real entrance is on, say, East Seventy-sixth Street.) “I usually try to talk them out of it,” Borelli said, referring to vainglorious building owners. “If you’re having a heart attack and you’ve got a vanity address, it could take a few crucial moments for the E.M.T. driver to figure it out. And you could be dead by the time help arrives.” The residents of 44 West Sixty-second Street once sued the owners of 62 West Sixty-second Street, whose nifty mnemonic address comes at the expense of directional logic: it is east, not west, of No. 44. The plaintiffs were upset about missing out on pizza deliveries and Town Car pickups amid the confusion. (They lost.)

Borelli had a map of midtown on his desk, and noted that this magazine story was likely to be written and edited in a building whose address is 4 Times Square—an honorific that predates his taking office, two years ago. “You could say that it’s across the street from 1 Times Square or 6 Times Square in order to help your friends find you,” he said, and paused before continuing. “I’m being facetious, because where are those places?” His map showed that 2 Times Square is five blocks north of Nos. 1, 3, and 4. Borelli recently informed the developers of a planned office tower at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street that, regardless of what some promotional materials might say, their site, on the edge of Hell’s Kitchen, is not recognized as 11 Times Square.

Not all requests are so unreasonable. The most recent application that Borelli approved came from Goldman Sachs, which is building new headquarters in Battery Park City, across from the World Trade Center site. “It’s on Route 9A, which is the West Side Highway, in front of what is technically Marginal Street,” he said, turning to a giant map of Manhattan that was mounted above his desk. “The everyday person would never know that Marginal Street exists, because, physically, it’s a highway.” Then he pointed at a couple of other little-known roads called Marginal Street—one near the sewage-treatment plant below Riverbank State Park and one in Inwood, near Sherman Creek. “It’s, like, the technical name for streets with no name,” he said. “But we don’t do street names. That’s the City Council.” It seemed easier to grant Goldman a more dignified address: 200 West Street.

Real-estate peacocking is less prevalent in the outer boroughs. A topographical engineer in Queens, reached on the telephone last week, quickly named all seven of his borough’s vanity addresses, including 1 New York Times Plaza, which refers to the paper’s printing facility on the Whitestone Expressway. Brooklyn now has 100 Brooklyn Bridge Park, which is really on Furman Street. In Staten Island, a spokesman reported, “We’ve never given out a vanity address in all our years.” And a representative from the Bronx Borough President’s office said, “I’ve never even thought of it before, but it’s kind of cool.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.